I'd argue Reynolds understands rap as a danceFLOOR related field rather than from a dance-genre perspective

The NYC Rap he's finding in disdain doesn't work in a club outside of certain exceptions, it's car, insular, withdrawing music AND Black American to boot (in opposition to Tricky who's at least British and his hip-hop draws from post-punk and is a lot more of a post-punk like collage than the American Pop Regurgitation). It's a lot like jazz afficianados loving music that strayed from its dancefloor lineage and thereby became a thing that celebrated itself but often became more and more estranged from being Pop minded and thus finding itself displaced.

Also I don't imagine a lot of West Coast gangsta rap for all it's many sonics interesting him because it deals with the non-NYC sense of American spaciousness. Most non-NYC Rap in the US literally sounds built to roll over hills and stretch, it doesn't have the compact tension and burst feeling of a lot of UK music that comes from claustrophobia.
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well the funny thing is that Reynolds lived in NYC for about 18 years and has lived in LA now for nearly 10. So he has an "in" to the feeling of those urban spaces and how they affect psychology and sonics that most Brit-based fans would not have had, could only access through projection, received imagery, the myths of those cities

still you might say you can take the Brit out of Britain but you can't take the Britishness out, so maybe that still applies

i was actually living in NYC when all that East Coast hardcore rap came out - i don't disdain it, i just find it flatter and more level, sonically, than the stuff that was going on in the UK at that time, whether its direct counterpart (trip hop) or its mutant warped cousin (jungle)

always loved G-Funk and Dre etc from afar, but my feeling for West Coast (and Atlanta) music has really been expanded through being part of a car culture - being in the car regularly and for long stretches at a time, learning to drive finally at an advanced age, having the radio on constantly while in motion - it's a completely different set-and-setting for listening to all music but especially hip hop, it changes your criteria.

when i was living in NYC i hardly ever listened to the radio (and the only time i'd be in a car would be a cab late at night after a club). now car radio is my main source for hearing things other than stuff i'm sent or that I read about. time and again i've heard thing that are completely dismissed or ignored by critics, achieve a life and a currency on hip hop radio that makes a nonsense of the instanta-judgements that reviewers necessarily have to make about albums in this high-turnover environment. tunes creep up on repeated play, through half-attentive listening, through semi-conscious choices like whether to flip to another station or stick with the one you're on.

the ambient-like properties of tunes become a factor - their sessionability if you like. how they fill up the space of the car, how they fit with the right mood for driving. it would slant towards a cruise-control aesthetic rather than at-your-throat energy

reading you discuss pop context, I begin to understand a couple things - for one your unwillingness to grasp the divorce of guitars from pop song logic (including, yes, the scalar frenzy of shredding)

divorced from pop structure, the guitar riff and guitar lead no longer serve a pop function - hence in a context where everything is judged by its relation to pop functionality, they are indeed useless ("pointless intensity")

leaving aside metal - let's not try that again - for something more critically acceptable, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the original hardcore (i.e. punk) to the degree that you're familiar. its departure point is a better later and achieved thru pure speed and/or energy but the result is the same - divorce of the song from the chord and ultimately, pop logic. specifically, it generally follows your usual best-known equals best - Black Flag, Minor Threat, Discharge, etc - but (like metal) not only does best have nothing to do with pop logic, the music's vitality actively decreases exactly to the degree it is recaptured by pop - i.e. hardcore's ethos of "noise not music", it's single defining anthem if any is "Nothing" by Negative Approach, etc

for reference, the ultimate and perfect distillation of stupid prescient teenage nihilism

and/or literally any song off Why

and consider one or either an entry in the game, why not

luka would just recoil in horror, but I have faith in your natural critic's instinct to be on the ride side of history

well i don't know about all that - i mean, some of my favorite groups in the late Eighties would have been Husker Du, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Loop, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jr - with Du and MBV in particular there is pop in there, but there's also guitar excess a plenty. Leary and Mascis could do a conventional extended rock solo, SY had their own version of those moments of overload and excess.

One of my favorite Du songs is "Reoccurring Dreams" which is a 16 minute improvised jam of psychedelic noise with near-jazz drumming (compared at the time by critics to Mahavishnu Orchestra, which caused me to scratch my head as I'd never heard the name Mahavishnu before).

i actually bought a lot of hardcore records in the early-mid Eighties and one of them was Negative Approach "Tied Down" the LP. Which "Nothing" is on, but i don't remember that tune. It sounds good - not as good as the title track, the one that really sticks with me - but it's not guitar-expansive or excessive. In the simplicity of the tune, it's not exactly pop, no, but it's not that far from the Ramones.

Discharge I could never really get on with - my younger brother was into them though. It actually sounds better than I remember.

I tend to feel with punk that the existence of a tune is generally not a bad thing - and most of what I would think of as the great punk groups, and the great hardcore groups, all had killer hooks. Buzzcocks, X Ray Spex, Descendents, Angry Samoans, Pistols, Ruts

in that sense, it's perhaps not as hostile to pop logic as you suggest.

Flipper - one of my fave bands of that era. They always had a riff and a groove, though.

The Black Flag that i would love would be either the rollicking "TV Party" or the wallowing "Damaged I". My War goes too far into the dirge zone for me but is certainly a kind of achievement. I like the Greg Ginn mutilated solos aesthetic but Gone was too much of a pure muso proposition for me and the later SST releases get pretty draggy.

reading you discuss pop context, I begin to understand a couple things - for one your unwillingness to grasp the divorce of guitars from pop song logic (including, yes, the scalar frenzy of shredding)

divorced from pop structure, the guitar riff and guitar lead no longer serve a pop function - hence in a context where everything is judged by its relation to pop functionality, they are indeed useless ("pointless intensity")

expanding on the previous - i wouldn't say that pop-logic is a blanket criteria or perspective for me at all - i mean most of this week i'm been listening to and enjoying all this kind of overloaded splattertronica on labels like PAN, and generally a lot of the time i'm listening to really abstract electronic or musique concrete things from the past, or ambient droning things

but i do like that zone where things enter pop and change it, but also are changed by pop

there's pop potential in things like disco, dance music in general, hip hop - and often the best things come when that reaches fruition - but that in turn changes what pop can be, expands it

in terms of rock specifically, i do have an interest in what i call 'radio rock' - basically pop that rocks, rock that pops

and that's glam, essentially - it's all the power and rhythmic force and heat of rock compressed into a structure and also artfully arranged and produced so that it's like a little drama staged on the radio

the difference between the Mott of "Rock and Roll Queen" and the Mott of "Dudes" and "All the Way from Memphis" is that they slough off all that Island Records circa 1970 jamming looseness, that warm muddy as-if-live sound, and they acquire clarity and structure and focus.

As well as The Sweet and so forth, that radio rock lineage would include Cheap Trick, Steve Miller Band, but also the hits by Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, Boston, ZZ Top, Van Halen... later on "Rock Me Like A Hurricane", "Pour Some Sugar On Me", "Crazy Train"

of necessity, it's not heavy music in the main, and guitar excess is kept on a leash, but it all rocks

opening is very "Foxy Lady" - lead guitar flares for just a second - also about as straightforward a groove as I can recall hearing Moon play

decent riff - rock opera era Who are too multitudinous to ever just take a riff and hammer it, but obviously they can do a fine momentary approximation when they want to

Townshend obv a very important early power chord proponent but he never really followed its logic further - became just one tool of many in his box

in rock's meta-context - it's the turn of the 70s, transition point in heavy guitars from the heavy psych era to hard rock proper as embodied in the Zep-Sabb axis

1:05 now into a bit of true proto-hard rock territory - a buildup some outfit like Buffalo or Dust might employ before dropping into full crunch, but instead...

1:28 ringing open chords over Entwistle

an interesting truism about The Who is the inversion of traditional guitar and bass roles, Entwistle as de facto lead insomuch as they have one. Townshend as a player tends to blur rhythm and lead - that knack of never playing rhythm in quite the same way, incorporating tons of little tricks - partial or modified chords, the odd dissonant note - in general the sense of taking a normal thing and changing its angle not enough to make it weird but just enough to confound your expectations for a moment, a kind of double consciousness.

you can very much hear the furthering of that blurred rhythm/lead, changing angles approach in people like Bob Mould

I like how the back half is mostly just a couple chords and Entwistle steady drone as a platform for Moon to work it out - a strong part of his magic the ability to keep perfect time without seeming to play an actual beat, just endless overlapping fills - that sense of phantom octopus limbs that Jaki Liebezeit could also evoke

in general the Who fall into the category things I respect but have never really gotten into aside from the odd thing here and they here

like I'll hear a bit from one of them that I like and just as you notice it they're already onto something else - see above comment on never locking into a riff or groove

I also respect their ability to have 3 guys doing basically separate things, and I guess there is an appeal in that sense of restrained entropy, maintaining a cohesive whole that seems to be constantly pulling itself apart in multiple directions, respect the sheer technical/compositional ability - but that the same time it's like, just play the fucking song, guys

unsurprisingly my favorite Who song is the very late, post-Moon "Eminence Front" where they embrace 80s Queen-style arena funk rock and work out a solid groove

and now a bit of tremolo riffing over a blastbeat - i.e., death metal - but just a bit. still v mid-tempo by death metal standards.

this in fact much more of a verse-chorus structure than the Deicide-Suffocation etc lineage of song as succession of riffs - you can hear where Entombed was about to in a year or two with Wolverine Blues. you can also hear where the meta of Swedish death metal will eventually transition from the Stockholm to the Gothenburg sound.

on a related note, this is basically Amon Amarth's entire career encapsulated in 4 minutes

vocals guttural but not full on USDM-style brutal death growl/gurgle - more like a deeper Tom G. Warrior, complete with interspersed "huh" grunts - ofc great, no one ever went wrong worshiping at the altar of the great Tom G.

I like the guitar tone - they're one of the only big 1st wave Swedish bands not record at Sunlight with Tomas Skogsberg, so instead of the typical Swedeath overdriven Boss HM-2 fuzz (which is also awesome, tbc) a cleaner/more straightforward sound that fits their no-nonsense ethos. basically no lead guitar - Unleashed doesn't your frills, just the pummeling of mid-tempo gallop.

lyrics interesting in that they're the first DM band I know of to embrace Viking stuff - influenced I assume by latter Bathory's pioneering of Viking metal - in place of early death metal's typical obsession with death, rotting, zombies, etc and/or evil. it's since been done (pardon pun) to death - see above comment on Amon Amarth - but novel at the time. the line "crush the men of fashion's flow" makes me laugh, like they're going to raid and pillage Paris Fashion Week.

in summation - not the best, or most innovative, and would get stale quick I had to listen to it all the time, but when you want to fist pump and go FUCK YEAH and gear yourself up to march onward to the countless battles of adult life in the modern world, Unleashed is pretty great

it's not differing core values it's just wanky existentialism. it's always visualise, visualise visualise. There is nothing to visualise! I don't go driving around in cars in new york. I don't go on romantic dates or anything. my communal experience are the fucking london underground and government offices with interminable bureaucracies. I even hate most gigs/clubs with plastic people with no spark looking to accrue more social capital. Pubs are dead! Football is dead! speaking your mind is dead! Johnny Rotten isn't tragedy anymore, he's just farce! just a bad joke! American narcissism has colonised our culture. the eye rules now, the ear is amputated! this is whilst i find most British punk boring i get those guys more coz they are not about serenity but force.

and before luka starts acting like a robespierre and admonishing me not to play this game im a Babeuf. It's not whether I like or dislike pop music. It's that pop music doesn't express my experience even if sonically interesting, unless it's also kind of alienated from the petrified values of the past, like up jumps da boogie.E

crowley - sorry I missed you last time around (I got that K-pop jam in a minute)

I recall you as a Ministry fan (rite?) so I gift you the ultimate industrial-disco sleaze tune

OH I KNOW THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THIS ONE VERY WELL

This mix has a lot more spaciousness but the bass throb getting subdued kind of kills a lot of the charm.

I can't really listen to the EBMy field of Industrial anymore because it reminds me too much of bad times but it's amazing how its strength as 'aggro wyte rave' of America just can't be denied. That swooping scorched wail, the constant echo blasts of fragmented noise; they all work perfectly in synch with the synth wash and the simply funky drums in a way that should sound corny on paper (and to some extent is).

it's not differing core values it's just wanky existentialism. it's always visualise, visualise visualise. There is nothing to visualise! I don't go driving around in cars in new york. I don't go on romantic dates or anything. my communal experience are the fucking london underground and government offices with interminable bureaucracies. I even hate most gigs/clubs with plastic people with no spark looking to accrue more social capital. Pubs are dead! Football is dead! speaking your mind is dead! Johnny Rotten isn't tragedy anymore, he's just farce! just a bad joke! American narcissism has colonised our culture. the eye rules now, the ear is amputated! this is whilst i find most British punk boring i get those guys more coz they are not about serenity but force.

and before luka starts acting like a robespierre and admonishing me not to play this game im a Babeuf. It's not whether I like or dislike pop music. It's that pop music doesn't express my experience even if sonically interesting, unless it's also kind of alienated from the petrified values of the past, like up jumps da boogie.E